What About Enoch and Other Ancient Books
Ancient Writings That Were Read, Valued, and Sometimes Treated as Scripture
“It was also about these that Enoch, in the seventh generation from Adam, prophesied: ‘Look! The Lord comes with tens of thousands of his holy ones…’”
— Jude 14 (CSB)
Once we learn that early Jews and Christians read more books than the ones in most Bibles today, a very reasonable question comes up: what happened to all those other writings?
Some were ancient. Some were copied carefully. A few were quoted or referred to by New Testament writers. Some were read in churches, and a few were even included alongside biblical books in important ancient manuscripts. If they were valued that highly, why did most Christian traditions eventually leave them outside the canon?
The answer is not the same for every book.
Some were never widely treated as Scripture. Others were respected in certain regions but not in others. Some appeared too late to have come from the person whose name they carried. Others were useful for teaching but lacked a clear connection to the apostles or to the earliest period of Christianity.
And in a few cases, a book that most Christians did not preserve as Scripture remained canonical in another ancient Christian tradition.
So this is not really a story about one group of leaders sitting down and throwing unwanted books out of the Bible.
The history is much more interesting than that.
1 Enoch — Ancient, Influential, and Still Canonical for Some Christians
1 Enoch is probably the best place to begin because it raises so many of the questions people have about lost or rejected books.
The book is connected with Enoch, the man in Genesis who “walked with God” and was taken by God rather than experiencing an ordinary death. But 1 Enoch itself appears to be a collection of writings composed over a long period, probably beginning several centuries before Jesus.
It contains visions of heaven, angels, judgment, the coming of God's kingdom, and the mysterious “watchers” connected with the story in Genesis 6. Some parts can sound strange to modern readers, but we should remember that Daniel and Revelation also contain visions, angels, beasts, and highly symbolic language. Being unusual or apocalyptic was not, by itself, enough to keep a book outside the canon.
We know 1 Enoch was important in ancient Judaism because fragments of it were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That tells us people were reading and copying it in the centuries around the time of Jesus.
It is also especially interesting because Jude uses a prophecy attributed to Enoch:
“Look! The Lord comes with tens of thousands of his holy ones…”
— Jude 14
That tells us the writer of Jude knew Enochic tradition and considered this particular saying worth using.
But quoting a writing does not automatically make the entire book Scripture. Paul quoted Greek poets, and nobody concludes that the works of those poets therefore belong in the Bible.
“For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’”
— Acts 17:28
So Jude's quotation gives 1 Enoch importance, but it does not settle the canon question by itself.
Why Didn't Most Traditions Keep 1 Enoch?
There does not appear to have been one moment when a universally accepted book of Enoch was officially removed from everyone's Bible.
The evidence points instead to uneven acceptance.
Some Jewish and Christian communities valued it highly, while others did not treat it as Scripture. It also did not remain part of the main Hebrew and Greek biblical traditions used by most later Jewish and Christian communities.
Another difficulty was authorship. The historical Enoch of Genesis lived long before 1 Enoch was written, so the work speaks in Enoch's name rather than having been written by Enoch himself. Writing in the name of an ancient figure was known in Jewish literature of this period. How much that affected later decisions about the book is difficult to know. What we can see more clearly is that 1 Enoch never gained the same widespread and lasting canonical acceptance across Jewish and Christian communities that many other biblical books did.
Still, 1 Enoch did not disappear everywhere.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserved it as part of its biblical tradition, and that is one reason the complete text survived in Ge'ez when it was largely lost elsewhere.
That makes 1 Enoch a good reminder that “not in most Bibles” and “never considered Scripture” are not the same thing.
Jubilees — Retelling Israel's Earliest Story
The Book of Jubilees is another ancient Jewish writing from before the time of Jesus, probably from the second century BC.
It retells much of Genesis and the early part of Exodus, arranging events according to periods called jubilees. It gives additional details about biblical characters, angels, festivals, laws, and the calendar.
Like 1 Enoch, copies of Jubilees were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, showing that it was important to at least some Jewish communities.
Most Jewish and Christian traditions did not ultimately include Jubilees in their canon. Its acceptance was never widespread enough across those communities for it to gain the same lasting canonical position as the books that became part of the Hebrew Bible and most Christian Old Testaments. The surviving evidence does not allow us to reduce that history to one simple reason.
But again, it did not disappear from Christianity altogether. It remains part of the broader Ethiopian Orthodox biblical tradition.
So Jubilees was not simply a “bad book” that everyone rejected. It was an ancient religious work that held greater authority in some communities than in others.
The Didache — A Window Into Early Christian Life
The Didache, whose name means Teaching, is quite different from Enoch or Jubilees.
It is an early Christian writing, probably from the late first or early second century, and it gives practical instruction about Christian living, baptism, fasting, prayer, the Lord's Supper, traveling teachers, and church life.
Reading it can feel a little like looking through a window into a very early Christian community.
That makes it extremely valuable historically.
The Didache was respected by early Christians, but it did not gain the same broad recognition as the Gospels or apostolic letters. One likely reason is that it does not claim clearly to come from one of the apostles themselves, even though its title connects its teaching with the apostles.
Its lack of a clear claim to apostolic authorship may have been one factor, but the evidence does not give us one documented reason why it remained outside the widely received New Testament canon.
It seems to have been treated mainly as useful church instruction rather than as a universally recognized apostolic writing.
That does not make it unimportant.
It simply places it in a different category.
The Shepherd of Hermas — Popular but Not Apostolic
The Shepherd of Hermas was another very popular early Christian work, probably written in Rome during the second century.
It contains visions, commandments, and parables dealing with repentance, moral living, and faithfulness.
Some early Christians valued it greatly. It even appears in the famous fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus after the New Testament books, alongside another early Christian work.
That tells us something important: being copied in the same ancient volume as biblical books does not automatically mean every reader considered it equal to Scripture.
One major problem for the Shepherd of Hermas was its date. It appears to have been written too late to come from the apostolic generation.
For Christians trying to preserve the testimony closest to Jesus and His apostles, that mattered.
So the Shepherd could be spiritually useful without carrying the same authority as writings believed to come from the apostolic period.
1 Clement — A Very Early Christian Letter
1 Clement is especially interesting because it is quite early.
It is a letter from the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, usually dated near the end of the first century. It addresses conflict within the Corinthian church and encourages humility, order, faithfulness, and peace.
Some Christians valued 1 Clement greatly, and it was sometimes read publicly.
It also appears in Codex Alexandrinus, an important fifth-century biblical manuscript, after the New Testament books.
Again, that shows how respected it was.
But 1 Clement did not become part of the New Testament used by most Christian traditions. One reason seems to be that, although very early and connected with the Roman church, it was not regarded as an apostolic writing in the same way as Paul's letters or the four Gospels.
It belonged close to the apostolic world.
But “close” was not always considered the same thing as apostolic.
The Gospel of Thomas — Sayings Attributed to Jesus
The Gospel of Thomas is different again.
A nearly complete Coptic copy was discovered near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, although portions in Greek had already been found earlier. It contains more than a hundred sayings attributed to Jesus, rather than a story of His life, death, and resurrection.
Some sayings sound quite similar to sayings in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Others are much more difficult and unfamiliar.
Scholars continue to debate the history of the book. Some individual sayings may preserve quite early traditions, while the surviving collection in its present form is generally understood to have developed later than the earliest Gospel traditions.
That is one reason it did not gain broad canonical acceptance.
Another is that its theology and presentation of Jesus differ in important ways from the four Gospels that had become widely used across Christian communities. It also lacks the narrative of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that stood at the heart of earliest Christian preaching.
That does not mean Thomas is worthless.
It is historically important and can help scholars study the variety of beliefs and Jesus traditions circulating in early Christianity.
But historical importance and canonical authority are not the same thing.
Were These Books Rejected Because Church Leaders Didn't Like Them?
Sometimes the story is told this way: church leaders had a large number of equally valid books, chose the ones that supported their theology, and suppressed the rest.
There were certainly theological disputes in early Christianity, and church leaders were just as capable of human bias as anyone else. We should not pretend that politics, personality, or religious interests never entered the picture.
But the evidence does not support such a simple explanation for all of these books.
The writings had very different histories.
The Didache was respected but not strongly apostolic. The Shepherd of Hermas was popular but relatively late. First Clement was early and valued but did not gain the same apostolic standing as the books that became widely canonical. The Gospel of Thomas had a different history and never achieved the widespread acceptance of the four Gospels. Enoch and Jubilees were ancient Jewish writings that had real influence but were never universally received as Scripture across Judaism or Christianity.
There was no single reason and no single rejection event.
Why Were Some Books Valued Without Becoming Scripture?
This may be the simplest way to understand the issue.
A writing did not have to be Scripture to be useful.
Early Christians could read a sermon, a letter, a church manual, or an account of martyrs and learn something from it without believing it belonged beside the Gospels.
We do something similar today.
A good Christian book may explain Scripture beautifully. A sermon may change someone's life. A Bible commentary may help us understand a difficult passage.
But we do not add the commentary to the Bible.
Early Christians also made distinctions between writings, although the boundaries were still developing and were not always identical from one community to another.
What Seems to Have Mattered Most?
When we compare the books that gained wide acceptance with those that did not, several patterns appear.
Connection with the apostles or the earliest witnesses to Jesus mattered greatly. Early date mattered. Widespread use across different Christian communities mattered. Agreement with the core teaching already received about Jesus mattered too.
None of those tests worked like a mathematical formula, and different communities did not always reach the same answer.
But together they help explain why the four Gospels and major apostolic writings gained a broader and more lasting place than many other ancient books.
The closer a writing could be connected to the earliest testimony about Jesus, the stronger its position tended to be.
That is especially important for our approach in this series.
Quoted Does Not Always Mean Canonical
One more lesson is worth remembering.
Biblical writers sometimes used material from outside the collection that later became Scripture.
Jude's use of Enoch is our clearest example in this chapter. Paul also quoted non-Jewish poets. New Testament writers could draw on familiar sayings, traditions, and literature without declaring every word of the original source inspired Scripture.
So when someone says, “Jude quoted Enoch, therefore Enoch must belong in everyone's Bible,” the evidence does not quite take us that far.
But the opposite response—“Enoch is not in my Bible, therefore it was meaningless to early Christians”—also goes too far.
The evidence calls for a more thoughtful answer.
Enoch mattered.
It simply did not have the same canonical history everywhere.
What We Can Say With Confidence
We can say that early Jews and Christians read a much wider range of religious writings than those found in most Bibles today. Some, such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees, came from the Jewish world before Christianity. Others, such as the Didache, Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement, and Gospel of Thomas, came from the early Christian period.
They were not all treated alike.
Some were highly valued. Some were read publicly. Some were copied beside biblical books. Some were treated as Scripture by particular communities, and some remain canonical within ancient Christian traditions today. But being old, useful, popular, or quoted did not automatically give a book universal scriptural authority. Our outline makes that distinction especially important with 1 Enoch: its antiquity and use by Jude deserve attention, while its uneven canonical history should be stated just as clearly.
The history is not as simple as “these books were thrown out.”
Most were never universally in.
That brings us to the next question naturally, because if ancient Christian communities inherited somewhat different collections, it is no surprise that modern Bibles do not all contain exactly the same books.
In the next chapter, we will ask:
Why do some Bibles have more books than others?
